Former President of the Ghana Association of Banks, Alhassan Andani, has called on government to assemble the brightest minds in Ghana’s finance industry to help analyse and formulate policies ahead of the IMF approval.

According to him, there is a grave need to interrogate the underbelly of the current economic crisis and appropriately address the problems identified by proffering viable solutions to restructure Ghana’s fiscal space to prevent a repetition of the crisis.

He noted that it would also improve the country’s credibility on the international market.

Alhassan Andani was speaking on the government’s domestic debt exchange programme on JoyNews’ PM Express.

According to him, despite the knowledge that the country was going to default on its debt, the government had nonetheless presented a heavily bloated budget which did not reflect the austere situation it was imposing on the citizenry.

“This year whilst we were actually looking forward to default on international and domestic debt we still presented a budget with a huge deficit in it. Think about it, would you do that?

“If it was just your paycheck, and there are 30 people outside the door waiting for you to pay 10,000 cedis and your salary is 2,000 and then your wife is still in the room to take your 2,000 with a market list of 4,000cedis to add another debtor to the back of the door – that’s just what we do. And I’m saying let’s stop it,” he said.

He continued, “We don’t need any young chap who hasn’t done five years in banking as part of an IMF team to come and tell us this. We’ve got our own domestic IMF people. We’ve got people who have worked with IMF and retired and they’re here, we’ve got bankers who’ve retired and they’re here , we’ve got economists, we’ve got people who have this.

“Have we assembled our own domestic team to say ‘why are we getting it wrong?’ and take their word and get it done? Now we’re waiting for some group of people to come and tell us what we know? For me that’s where that long term credibility is being lost and that’s where the entire credibility of this country…but if the external market, the capital market, our external partners, saw that we have assembled a credible domestic team to deal with this, look at the optics.

“If President John Mahama and President Akufo-Addo were sitting with two top economists having a conversation about this …because this is not about a four year event, it’s about the life of this country, look at the optical impact. Have we done that yet? Let’s put together our own domestic IMF probably higher caliber team before somebody else comes to tell us that,” he said.